Exclusive Behind The Scenes Look At ‘Skullkickers’

Skullkickers has been causing quite a ruckus at Image comics over the past year with relentless fast-paced action, ridiculous characters, and brilliantly colored pages. This book takes from every fantastical genre you could imagine and combines them into one outrageous book filled with goblins, undead corpses, and werewolves. Writer Jim Zub has given BD an exclusive behind the scenes look into his brutally hilarious series, and the epic 4-page spread is truly something magnificent to behold.

After the jump, Zubkavich takes you through the entire creative process, from full scripted pages, to layouts, to final lettered pages, plus some insightful commentary that you won’t find anywhere else. For anyone interested in breaking into the comics field, this is some very insightful and inspiring stuff. Skullkickers Treasure Trove Vol 1 is available in stores as of today, and it comes highly recommended.

From writer Jim Zub:

After 2 issues of action and banter, issue #3 opens up with our two merceneary monster mashers chilling out a bit. I wanted to start opening up broader concepts about the world, hinting at some of the larger ridiculous themes that I thought about exploring if the mini-series was extended past our initial 5 issues romp. Thankfully, we did just that and are currently on our third story arc, pushing the Skullkickers onwards to bigger and crazier adventures each time.

The dwarf has procured a pot of poisoned stew. His dwarven constitution will help him survive its effects, but it will also leave him with a peyote-esque dream of something which may or may not be real.

Unlike a lot of our other issues where the momentum is constant, this scene builds up the strangeness as the stew starts to take effect. I love the moment-to-moment transitions as the dwarf realizes something just isn’t right with that night sky.

The 4 page spread of the visions (printed in the issue as two 2 pagers, but here in all its glory) was such a weird and wild rambling script
that Edwin actually asked me to help him figure it out compositionally. I doodled a couple quick sketches of the overall sweeping look and added a quick breakdown of the elements so it would all make sense.

The cover to issue #3 was simple in its approach. I asked Chris to draw the boys overwhelmed by zombie-skeletons, fighting their way through the mass. As expected, he delivered it in spades.